Hacker News Reader

Comment by __dontom__ | Hacker News Reader

Did you do that in an agency as well? I mean it's one thing if you are developing a product, but telling your clients "the project is finished when it's finished and we won't be able to tell you how much it will cost you until it's finished" doesn't really fly in my experience.

View on HN

Seems like charging a specific fee might help alleviate some of the concerns about that. Though I suppose you still need to know how much money you should charge.

I really hate estimates and have always hated estimating projects. I do appreciate the need/desire for them by some in management. I've tried to figure out how other people do it and have yet to find anything satisfactory. It doesn't have to be an extremely simple process, but I don't really know how one gets better at estimating. The only way to get better is to just understand the domain more clearly but estimating doesn't really help with that.

Kanban does have a cool idea of just attempting to break down work into equal parts and measuring the throughput of these roughly equally sized components. The only problem is actually sizing stories to be equally sized. Some changes don't have any kind of real stopping point of functionality without large changes. It seems kind of arbitrary to chunk it out just because your project management system wants you to.

Me personally: no. But friends of mine owning an agency do this with all their clients. The gist of it is: don't think project, but iterations that deliver value every time you end one. The customer pays per iteration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com